‘The Pot Au Feu’ review: Trần Anh Hùng offers a feast for the eyes but is missing a key ingredient | Cannes

Have you ever cried when you tasted something for the first time? In The Pot Au Feu, the most mouth-watering edition to this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or line-up, not one person experiences such profound levels of gastronomic bliss. Trần Anh Hùng, director of Cannes Camera d’Or winner The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) and Norwegian Wood (2010) is in good form, delivering his seventh feature a whole seven years after his latest, the star-studded French drama Eternity. The new film is actually based on the 1924 novel “The Life and Passion of Dodin Bouffant, Gourmet” by Marcel Rouff about the eponymous Dodin (a single handsome aristocrat played by the charming Benoît Magimel), his personal cook, Eugénie (an effervescent Juliette Binoche), and their shared love for culinary pleasures. 

From its very opening scene, the film is inviting us to anticipate 145 minutes of sensual delight: a nimble camera with steady zooms, pans, and tracks seems to caress a plethora of foods in preparation. Hand-picking vegetables, steaming, sprinkling, sizzling, seasoning, braising, cutting—all these acts are performed with attentiveness and love, shot in zooming close-ups that linger and explore the elegance of every movement. The Pot Au Feu knows what it’s going for, and does it well: it banks heavily on presenting a simple love story with the aesthetic assurance of its subject-matter, food. The art of cooking is captured here as a prolonged ritual and in a way, one doesn’t even have to know the names of the ingredients, the dishes, or the wines that come to accompany them on the table after, just basking in the act of looking can elicit the viewer’s tactile response, as if you’re there: smelling, tasting, touching, with your eyes. 

Dispensing with the use of any music aside from the natural sounds of the cooking process, serving, and tasting, The Pot Au Feu stands out as an evocative example of both period and culinary cinema. For anyone who stands at the intersection of those two genres (which are generally considered more audience friendly than most), this film would be a great way to spend a Sunday evening. A comfortable watch nonetheless, the film stays too much on the safe side to cause any groundbreaking transformations to either of its genre-parents.

Tràn Anh Hùng’s approach to recreating the process of cooking is obviously true to that of his protagonists. Because of the relationship between Dodin and Eugénie—which is one of heightened eroticism and trust—no recipe is just a name. On the contrary, they are all symbols: of the seasons, of the stages of the lives they’ve shared for over 20 years in the kitchen, and of their mutual understanding. Magimel and Binoche are unsurprisingly perfect, communicating with little dialogue and the occasional smiling glance, but this is enough to get a strong sense of how indispensable these two characters are for each other. 

The patience involved in every single recipe, the shared act of preparing a meal with tens and tens of stages before the end result, and the pleasure of celebrating one another at the dinner table all frame the couple as soulmates by way of gastronomy. While the novel begins with the very sudden death of Eugénie, in the film this inevitable fact is delayed, carving out a space for the two to tease one another with a potential marriage proposal and for us, the audience, to revel in Binoche’s illuminating presence. There certainly isn’t an actress in the world who is better suited for this role.

Together, cinematographer Jonathan Riquebourg and editor Mario Battistel craft a feast for the eyes—and all other senses—with a meticulous, but intimate approach to storytelling via food. No review could do justice to the beauty of those shots, nor to the multitude of exceptional dishes—I’ll just mention a Baked Alaska cake and the titular slow-boiled meat dish—but at the heart of this film, there is emotional satisfaction of a relationship so tender and so pure (not because the erotic scenes here are cut short as soon as they commence) that one cannot help but sigh with admiration for Dodin and Eugénie’s blissful life.

Grade: B-

This review is from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival where The Pot Au Feu premiered in competition. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.

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Savina Petkova

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